4 Sales Lessons I Teach Every Harvard Business Graduate - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBolppgAywY

Transcript: (00:02) I didn't go to business school. Honestly, maybe I should have. I don't know. But you know what? You and me, we have our own resident Harvard business professor in Mark Rober. So, I cracked open the archives and I pulled together some of the lessons that Mark teaches every single one of his Harvard classes. They're essential for early career success. (00:22) And honestly, it made my own journey in starting in sales significantly less chaotic. Share it with your friends, with your peers, your team, or honestly just keep it all for yourself. I'd appreciate the word of mouth, but look, I get it. All right, let me grab a notebook. It's time for today's lesson. One of the topics we discuss at Harvard Business School and in the sales class is, you know, there's a prospect out there that's a perfect fit for your product, your business, but how do you get their attention? Like we we teach a lot about how to navigate the sales (00:54) process, but how do you even earn the right to start the sales process by booking a meeting? And there's this cool thing I do is I say, "Okay, everybody stand up. I'm going to start yelling out numbers with starting with one and sit down when I reach a number where that's the outreach um attempt that you're going to stop and give up, right?" So like and and outreach counts as like if if you call them and leave a voicemail and send an email, that's two outreaches. (01:22) Okay? So get everyone to stand up and I say okay one and like 10% of the students sit down and I say two and like another 10%. For whatever reason, four is like a magic. I would say by the time I get to four outreaches, more than half the students have sat down. And then I'm like like challenging the ones that you're still st and I'm like five. (01:41) And they start getting uncomfortable. Six. And I'm like 10. And like two students are still up. And I'm like dude 10. Matthew, what are you going to do with like 10? All the students are laughing at them like what are you going to do for 10? What would your number be though by the way Matthew? Mine would probably be it would be four. (02:01) Okay, cool. So, like at four you start to get uncomfortable like I don't want to annoy this person, right? So, we're like sitting there making fun of the students and then I'll bring up like Sam Nelson helps me teach this class and I'm like okay what's the research say Sam? You've done this for like thousands of companies. He's like 17. (02:23) Hello, chiropractor Seattle. Hey. Uh, this is Mark's office, right? Uh, yeah. This is this is Dr. Mark's office. This is Tim, his assistant. Tim, nice to meet you. My name is Matt. Uh, hey, I'll tell you what. It's lunchtime right now. And have you guys ordered food yet? Uh, we haven't. What is this about? So, I run a pizza delivery company, and I think you guys would love what we're doing. We're new to the neighborhood. (02:51) Uh, if you would be interested, what kind of pizza you guys like? Um, I don't even know. I've never seen the doctor eat pizza. I don't know where to go. What do you mean? That's a no. Yeah, exactly. I mean, hey, I'm like, all right. Thank you. I have this respect for how many of these 22 year olds graduating college, they do this as their it's like the hardest job in sales. (03:24) If you're good, you get hung up on 80 to 90% of the time. If you're good, you know what I mean? If you're good, if you're good at this, you book a meeting a day. One meeting. Yeah. So, first off, this is like a game of seconds. Every word counts. This person is just ready. They're trying to get you off the phone. And so, you're just like, you want to be like super tight. And I hate scripts. (03:54) But like, if you're going to be tight on a script, I'd probably recommend one here for two reasons. Like, one, it's just such like a high intense first 5 10 seconds means everything moment. And then number two, usually I'm training someone on this that's very new to sales. Like this is the entry level sales role. (04:12) It's the hardest role anyone will ever do in sales. And unfortunately, you start there. Can I Let's reverse. Yeah. And I'll be the seller. Hello, this is Matthews Chiropractor Services. Hey, Matthew. Is uh Did I catch you at a bad time? Uh no. What can I help you with? Oh, actually this is great. I'll be brief. (04:31) Uh this is Mark from Mark's Creative Pizza Shop. We specialize in pizzas that drive the culture and happiness of a team during the workday. It's $20 and I was really just hoping to send you over a pizza for 20 bucks and brighten the day of your employees today. How does that sound? Uh we tend to eat uh a little healthier here. (04:53) Uh it sounds like it's a great business, but I'm not sure if it's something that we typically eat at the office. Like healthier how? like uh we the chiropractor Matthew, he tends to order more like salads type of meals. Well, I mean we're actually a perfect fit for that. Um like I said, this is around employee culture and sort of like brain food. (05:16) So, we're heavy in protein unlike a lot of other pizzas. So, we gravitate the healthier side. I really would love to just like it's $20. I really just want to send one over today and you know, brighten your guys' afternoon and give this a shot. I don't I'm not given any sort of budget control. I don't have $20 to be spending on a pizza today. (05:34) Yeah. I mean, like I wasn't expecting that you would, but I know like you guys are all about collectively to spend over $20 on lunch in just a few hours. I know it's like 10:00 a.m. over there in Seattle. This is going to actually be less than the collective office. So, people are going to save money and have a healthier I really just I I I think we should send a pizza over there for $20. (05:53) People will save money and have a really productive afternoon. Uh, you know, maybe we're a little busy right now. Could you give us a call back? Maybe tomorrow. That might work best for us. Yeah. Actually, the fact that you are busy. This is perfect because everyone's about to waste 20 minutes to order food. (06:08) This is going to save 20 minutes time. I'm guessing you have four people over there. This is going to save an hour and 20 minutes of time. If you just place the order, the pizza shows up. And I was like, Matthew, this is great. What a busy day. And lunch is ready for us. $20. Hour and 20 minutes left. (06:24) What do you say, Matthew? I want to send you over a pizza. Sure. Fine. Uh yeah, you just uh just send it over to the office. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. We'll be there in 30 minutes. Thank you, Matthew. Thanks. Bye. Okay. I don't know what's more stressful, honestly. It's like being put in that position or like having to be the one talking. (06:41) Sales is fundamentally changing. AI adoption is separating winners from losers and the teams that adapt fastest are thriving while the others are worried about market turbulence. HubSpot's 2025 sales trends presented by the science of scaling gives an inside look at how 10,00 sales pros are adapting, growing, and connecting in a shifting business landscape. (07:06) This isn't just a collection of statistics. It's your guide to what's actually working in the field today. So, grab it, read it, start putting it to work immediately. Link is in the description. I've never seen a sales hiring context where you shouldn't have them do a role play. It's like having someone try out for a sports team and not playing the sport. (07:27) You know what I mean? Imagine Matthew was like, "Hey, come on out and try to be on our basketball team." And all we do is talk about what you've done in the past. You don't even pick up a basketball once to shoot it. Yeah. I'd love that. You'd make the NBA, right? So, so that's crazy. And that's very important here to coachability. (07:43) This is my favorite part of the interview is I'm like, "Okay, Matt, we're going to do a role play. You can take as much time as you want cuz I'm not testing how quickly you think. When I throw you objections, I'm thinking how quickly you think. But in this case, you usually have time to prepare for a meeting. So, you're going to be a salesperson for XYZ company. (07:58) I'm gonna be a buyer. And then we do the role play. But then at some point, 5 or 10 minutes in, I'll stop it. And now I'm testing coachability. So, I'll say, "Matthew, how did you think that role play went?" I thought it went pretty good. I hit all the points I needed to. Cool. So, that for me would be a really bad answer because like every salesperson can always criticize a sales performance. (08:19) No athlete comes out of a game like I didn't make a single mistake. Not possible. Having the lack of like self diagnosis is a red flag for me. Okay. Versus if you were like, well, you know, I think I did pretty good here, but like I don't know. I I'm not sure I handled this answer well. Then I dig in. Well, what do you mean? Like how else would you have answered it? And I'm starting to get a sense of like how you're thinking through these things. (08:40) In every interview, I give one piece of positive feedback and one piece of needs for improvement feedback because if I just go right into like giving you criticism, some people might start having an anxiety attack, right? Like this is a big deal. You're going for this like job, you're like getting like feedback from the VP of sales for this job you want. (09:00) It's not really like replicating what it's going to be like 6 months into the job. You're going to be like just going through your emotions. You've done this a million times. So, I'd say something like, "Yeah, I thought you handled that objection so smoothly." What did you know about that? And then for improvement, I really wish you'd like triple click into the pain a little more. (09:16) Do you know what I mean by that? Here's an example. And then I might even have you like try it again. A couple things that are happening there is I see that Matthew was very focused on me. He was taking notes. He was listening versus someone that's just glassy. It's not registering. We might have a dialogue and I can see if it's actually sinking in. (09:32) And then at some point, whether it's in this interview or the next one, if they move on, they're going to have a chance to redo it. In a lot of cases, I'll have someone having done three or four role plays over the sequence of like whatever a couple of interviews to see that they're progressively improving. And that is like again for for me usually the number one driver of hiring a candidate. (09:51) What is our context? And often times we've rooted our context in this show in what we're selling to who and contextual stuff about our business. Are we a startup? Are we established company? Are we in Asia? Are we in South America? different context to our to our business and our selling context. So using those I can hypothesize on five to 10 attributes that I think are going to correlate with success in our model. (10:17) I'll give you three, Matthew, and all three were in the top five of HubSpot's rigorously tested attribute model in the first like 5 years of our existence. You can guess which one was number one. Ooh. I feel like the trap is that coachability might be at number one, but I think curiosity is number one. My gosh. (10:45) Every single audience, I would say 10% vote for intelligence, 60% vote for curiosity, and 30% vote for coachability. And coachability was the one that correlated the most. No, I know. Now, it again, it's circumstantial. I I know for a fact that there are a lot of hiring managers out there that hire primarily on curiosity. It works out very well, but just for me, it actually took me two years to even pick up on coachability. (11:09) If you're building a new team, you said scaling the team. I'm I'm only creating theories on what those attributes are. And so now what I want to do is validate those theories. So I'm going to go out and hire. It takes some time, right? So I need to establish a scorecard of putting those like 10 attributes down. (11:24) And I want to clearly define what each attribute means. And let's define what a score might look like. What what does an exceptional like eight eight n or 10 sound like on motivation? What is like a mediocre 4 67 sound like for motivation? What does a 1 2 3 sound like? So now like I've taken an hour to clearly define these 10 attributes. (11:47) What are they? And what does a high medium score look like? And now I just go start hiring. I hire two or three reps um every quarter or every month. And usually I have very good visibility within six, seven, eight months as to who's going to be good. And I put together this flywheel learning model where it's like, okay, Matthew's been with us for 6 months now. (12:08) He's a top performer. Why is he a top performer? He's a top performer because he's the most motivated and he's the most coachable. Did we pick up on that in the interview? Are we missing something? If I'm missing one of those attributes and motivation keeps coming up, I'm going to add motivation to our scorecard. (12:23) Bob, he got fired 7 months in. Sold two customers in 7 months. What was wrong with Bob? Bob had this issue. Bob had that issue. Are we seeing that consistently as a flaw in our sales hires? If so, let's add it into the model. So, it's like I can qualitative, like quantitatively through reflection, but low data points start to hone in on my ideal hiring format. (12:48) All right, that does it for this video. So, be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. We're also here in the studio. We got a whole lot of new projects started. We got new stories of scale. We got more master class with Mark. We even have a brand new series on the way very soon. (13:04) So, make sure you're subscribed. Also, if you haven't grabbed the sales report yet, be sure you do so. It's in the link in the description. All right, that does it for me. In the words of Mark Rober, happy scaling.